edible seeds from common trees?

This spring, I'm seeing a wild abundance of seed on trees like maple, locust, and the always profuse redbud. Where might I research edibility and preparation? Any firm knowledge or experimentation?

Tree availability varies by region, so your local county museums, state agricultural extensions and local college faculties can best advise you. California live oaks (mostly in the south, since they are drought-adapted) have edible acorns, as do some of their relatives such as northern tan oaks. Live oaks release acorns each fall, however, while tan oaks only produce acorns every 2 years. See also Native American museums and any books written by Native Americans about foraging and native plants. (I found 2 very useful paperback books at my local county museum gift shop.) One famous example from the northern Midwest that I talked about earlier in our Zeitgeist thread is Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden. She talks mainly about food plants, not trees, though. Here is a lot of info about the scope of that book:

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/buffalo/garden/garden.html

Oftentimes your local plant nurseries will also have a wealth of knowledge, as well as inexpensive but authoritative paperback books on such topics. Here is a link to my favorite Northern California plant nursery, located in Willits, CA:

http://www.sanhedrinnursery.com/

Here's also more specific info from the Arbor Foundation:

http://www.arborday.org/trees/wtit/

From the Virginia Dept. of Forestry:

http://www.dof.virginia.gov/trees/

At the Federal level, there is the U.S. botanical garden, whose website has a tab on sustainability!

http://www.usbg.gov/

It's also possible that each state includes 1 or more botanical gardens, which offer many free classes and lists of experts, arborists and the like. I know California has several botanical gardens, such as:

http://southcoastbotanicgarden.org/

On a related topic, the 20th edition of the paperback classic work How To Prune Fruit Trees, by R. Sanford Martin is widely available.

Google for your local nutgrower's association. Ours is associated with a state land grant college, and includes all levels of expertise and interest from conservation to marketing, e.g., chestnuts, butternuts. (One fellow has dozens of varieties of pawpaws!)

ETA: Diana Beresford-Kroeger, author of the The Global Forest, is an ethnobotanist who may have written on preparation of edible trees. She certainly seems to appreciate their dietary potential!

2wonderY and everyone, here is the current blog entry (as of June 28, 2013) of author Christopher Nyerges, which features a tree expert. Fascinating discussion, and the expert has his own website linked on that page:

http://christophernyerges.blogspot.com/

2wonderY, also be aware of a title I just listed in our Zeitgeist thread, that may have more of the info you need on this topic. The touchstoned title is not the book I'm thinking of. The book I saw at the bookstore of The Institute for Solar Living is published by The Seed Savers Exchange:

Fruit, berry and nut inventory (4th edition, 2009), copyright Seed Savers Exchange. Here's that publisher page:
http://www.seedsavers.org/onlinestore/SSE-Books/

There's also free titles on Forestry from Project Guterberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Forestry

I've decided I need to purchase a copy of Backyard Foraging: 65 Familiar Plants You Didn't Know You Could Eat because it does such a good job of identifying common plants in my environment that have edible parts.